Prose, Poetry, and Script

Here we are in the middle of June, the first 100 blog posts have been published in three volumes entitled “Notes on Life and Living” and the three readers have given them rave reviews.  (They are available for $20 each if anyone is interested/ that amount just does cover the cost so I’m not ripping anyone off.)  Now I have prepared 18 philosophical poems about the same subject, As I Live My Life, and will print a limited number of them in a booklet.

Poems in this form are enjoyable to write; they are of a structure that I invented for conveying more or less esoteric thoughts.  The general form is two sets of two lines each of assertion, four lines of exposition, two more sets of two lines each of expansion, four lines of erudition, two lines of advice, and a one line conclusion.  It works for me and I’m the poet.

The objective of writing scripts for plays and movies hasn’t been abandoned; I keep talking about it but haven’t put pen to paper, finger to keypad yet.  The one play I wrote was pretty good, it didn’t go any further than an edited first draft so no one has taken it apart for me to rewrite.  I did it in a playwriting class and defended it fairly well; the professor thought I showed promise.

It seems to me that script writing almost has to be a collaborative effort, at least at first.  This assertion is borne out by famous play writes and the multiple credits on screenplays that I see in movies.  That a single individual can write a script from start to finish without collaboration would mean that the writer is a genius or has had the benefit of having done it with others many times before and knows what works and what doesn’t.

One of my Whodunnit buddies has written three scripts to date and I was lucky enough to perform in one of them.  They held water for the genre and audiences like them.  The Whodunnit process requires collaboration; an author can write what he/she thinks will work and then it is reviewed by objective third parties, has a dramatic reading, and finally goes into rehearsal.  Problems can be discovered anywhere along the way and rewriting is required time and again.

The ideal of a writer in his garret turning out finished plays is just that, no relation to reality.  In truth, the script is hammered over and over again until it takes the shape that will stand performance.  I doubt that the Whodunnit process is unique.

When talking to the co-author/director of my most recent movie appearance, he allowed that the script we used was the back story to the original script idea, which was found to be too ephemeral  for performance.  Much work went into the original concept such that when the back story became the script, it was finished in short order but not, however, without getting a paid professional to review it before production started.

This script, for a feature length movie, was approximately 80 pages and there were a lot of stage directions included.  Having observed this one closely because I was in it, I have to assume that it is fairly close to the “real deal.”  With more experienced actors, directors, and cinematographers, I can understand shorter scripts.  In this case the writers wanted the story told a certain way and, since one was also directing, that’s the way it was made.

The same was true of Atomic Bombers, a play I was in earlier this year.  The director was the author about 25 years earlier and he admitted that the way he directed it was a slightly different take on the story from the perspective of today’s post 9/11 world.  I’m sure the nuances were subtle because the script was the same original script used for the first production back then.

I am registered for a class in script analysis that should help me in this quest for putting my thoughts on stage.  The fact that I’m not a crusader, idealist, or activist may work against me but I am a philosopher and as long as I keep to my field of life and living and present my characters as being involved in that, I just may be able to pull this off.  The format could be Whodunnit, could be classical, could be comedy, and could be soap opera; they all will work because they all reflect life and living.

There is such a condensation of expression via words from prose to poetry, and such an expansion of expression when the ideas are put into play because the audience becomes emotionally involved without a written page.  This becomes my reason for doing it.  I’ve seen the economy of words that poetry allows, I’ve seen the complete expression that prose allows, and I’ve seen the way actors using the same script can interpret it differently but still faithfully.

The question that is begged is why?  Why would a reader bother to read others’ thoughts?  Why would an audience sit through 90 minutes of a whole lot of others’ ideas on a how a situation could be portrayed?  The answer is for entertainment, for the escape of not having to come up with the idea but rather have the idea presented to them to be enjoyed, accepted, or rejected.

Each reader or audience member has a different angle from which he/she is experiencing the work.  Some are on the top level of what is said and done; others are concerned with how it is said and/or done; and still others are commenting on the technique that the production company, in all the aspects of it, used to create the desired effect, and there are still other aspects of a production upon which people concentrate.  When writing prose, poetry, or script one cannot take all these things into account.  A good author brings a story, which allows each to enjoy along his own line of analysis and thus be entertained.